by Francesc Parcerisas | Translated from the Catalan by Cyrus Cassells
for Ewa Lipska and Maciej Niemiec
Orion and the Southern Cross elude us,
like a wind-driven chestnut
rolling away.
The mild drizzle hints
at fall’s forecast.
The still-living poets return,
and in a small zinc pipe,
they wash away
vestiges of listless words.
In the space labeled “The Void,”
you must follow a body
between sheets
and a warm hand controlling
delirious fear,
or offering a yellow passion
in morning’s open palm.
There where “the disillusionment of last words”
is legible,
you have to strain for colors
ensconced in the white mist
twining like a linen shroud
encircling the mountains.
O bless us with additional colors,
plus small stones turned rusty
by the apathy of meaning.
No, we’re not deterred,
crestfallen,
even if the rocks are revealed
to be tombs or feast-day markers.
They’re equal to the yellowed,
never-meant-to-be-read letters
or the vulnerable music
rainfall will dissolve:
messages always tucked
under the pillow or dangling
between your T-shirt
and the sweat beads
laving your chest,
forever there where we dream
time’s ebony minus
won’t whisk them away,
because they’re words,
and words are our loneliness
and penance.
Born in 1944, Francesc Parcerisas, the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Still Life with Children, Triumph of the Present, and The Golden Age, is considered the premier Catalan poet of his generation—a “miracle generation” of poets who came of age as Franco’s public banning of the Catalan language came to an end. He is also a masterly, award-winning translator of an impressive array of significant international writers, including T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Cesare Pavese, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Rimbaud, Susan Sontag, William Styron, and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Among his numerous translations from French, Italian, and English into Catalan, he is most famous in Catalonia for his translation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. His own poems have been translated into Basque, English, French, Gallego, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, and Welsh, among others.
Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate, is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books: 2022), Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way: 2024); Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022 (TCU Press: 2025), and Lorca to the Umpteenth Power (3: A Taos Press: 2026), a prose and poetry memoir rooted in Federico García Lorca’s Granada, featuring art by 2025 Texas Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla.
Cassells is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas (Stephen F. Austin State University Press: 2019); and To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin: 2023). Both volumes garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ biennial Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book. Cassells’s honors include the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize given by Poets & Writers, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, an NAACP Image Award nomination, two NEA grants, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a Regents’ and University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University.